Email is a store-and-forward method of composing, sending, receiving and storing messages over electronic communication systems. Email messages consist of two major sections: a message header (“header”)—structured into fields such as summary, sender, receiver, and other information about the e-mail, and a message body (“body”)—the message itself as unstructured text. The header consists of fields, usually including at least the following: “From:” (i.e the e-mail address, and optionally the name of the sender), “To:” (i.e. the e-mail address[es], and optionally name[s] of the message's recipient[s]), “Subject:” (i.e. a brief summary of the contents of the message) and “Date:” (e.g. the local time and date when the message was written.) Other common header fields include “Cc:” (i.e. carbon copy/address of another recipient), “Bcc:” (i.e. blind carbon copy so the recipient cannot be seen by other recipients), “Received:” (i.e. tracking information generated by mail servers that have previously handled a message), “Content-Type:” (i.e. information about how the message has to be displayed, usually a MIME type), “Reply-To:” (i.e. address that should be used to reply to the sender), “References:” (i.e. message-id of the message that this is a reply to, and the message-id of this message, etc. ), “In-Reply-To:” (i.e. message-id of the message that this is a reply to.) Other header field may be used in other embodiments and new header fields may be defined and implemented in time.
Email messages received are frequently forwarded on to other recipient(s). For example, a first email recipient may forward an email to a second recipient; or the first email recipient may reply to the email and carbon-copy one or more other recipients. The body of the email commonly contains one or more headers from previous iterations of the email (i.e. same email being sent and received multiple times.) For example, an email sent by a User A to a User B, contains “From: User A” and “To: User B” in its header. As the email is forwarded on from User B to a User C, the new header is “From: User B” and “To: User C”; however, the body of the email now contains the original header “From: User A To: User B”. Thus the final recipient, User C, may be able to see the original email sent by User A, as the original email is embedded in the body of the new email. Itterations of an email—or related emails—embedded in an email, are referred to as an email trail. It is a common practice for users to read the contents of an email and manually scan the email trail for previous senders and copies of those senders' emails. On smaller electronic devices (e.g. cellular phones, PDAs, etc.) with limited display size, a user may be need to perform a burdensome amount of scrolling to locate and review all senders/recipients included in an email trail within an email.